Sometimes, and it's supposed to (not sure about the exact percentage though) but plenty of times you can watch your health bar melt away while still running around in a full duration fear.

I believe that is what the OP is most concerned about. The dropping through the world stuff is annoying (and pathing in general), but I'd hope that everyone would agree that that's just a bug.

If the problem is only the break threshold then that should be discussed.
Instead this is just a blatant attack on the whole mechanism, rather than just a small part of it. The part which is quite possibly broken.

I can actually fix fear pretty quickly, I've been advocating how to do it for ages.

1. All fear effects cause targets to tremble in place, rather than running around. - This prevents all bugs relating to getting stuck in walls and etc, and all annoyances with getting feared into bad positions.

2. All fear effects break on a consistent amount of health, say, 10% of max health of the feared player. - Currently different fear effects break on different %'s, and all of them have a non-trivial randomized value.

3. Some fear break effects need to be removed, there are way too many of them.

If the problem is only the break threshold then that should be discussed.Instead this is just a blatant attack on the whole mechanism, rather than just a small part of it. The part which is quite possibly broken.

Blatant attack? I think you might be taking this conversation a bit too seriously. If they fixed the actual bugs in Fear (of which there are quite a few), I'm sure most people would be okay with it.

I'm not understanding the insistence that Fear break on 10% damage (referring specifically to the Warlock spell Fear and not other Fear-effects). I think it should be at least 20-25% for the first Fear, but scale with the diminishing returns effect for subsequent applications. It'd then go 20-25% -> 10-12.5% -> 5-6.25% -> Immune.

As for the buggy pathing that can cause people to fall through the world, I'm still not sure that causing the target to tremble in place is a good solution. The warlock then has to waste precious CC uptime moving away from the target if it's melee. I think if it were to make the target run away from the Warlock in a straight line, rather than spastically all over the place, perhaps at 25-50% speed, that would prevent a lot of "falling through the world" problems and put a certain level of responsibility on a person attacking a Warlock to consider their positioning.

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I'm not understanding the insistence that Fear break on 10% damage (referring specifically to the Warlock spell Fear and not other Fear-effects). I think it should be at least 20-25% for the first Fear, but scale with the diminishing returns effect for subsequent applications. It'd then go 20-25% -> 10-12.5% -> 5-6.25% -> Immune.

because fear can be effectively used as a stun due to how durable it is.

its supposed to break on damage, people get understandably frustrated when it fails to break on massive amounts of damage that would easily break ccs like poly.

either fear is legitimately broken, or they need to reword it's tooltips to more accurately reflect it's break mechanics.

because fear can be effectively used as a stun due to how durable it is.

its supposed to break on damage, people get understandably frustrated when it fails to break on massive amounts of damage that would easily break ccs like poly.

either fear is legitimately broken, or they need to reword it's tooltips to more accurately reflect it's break mechanics.

Perhaps I phrased that wrongly - I get why people are saying it should break on damage, that's fine. What I don't get is why they insist it be such a low %. To me, that just sounds like "fuck Warlocks" rather than a serious suggestion about how to fix what they consider broken.

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Perhaps I phrased that wrongly - I get why people are saying it should break on damage, that's fine. What I don't get is why they insist it be such a low %. To me, that just sounds like "fuck Warlocks" rather than a serious suggestion about how to fix what they consider broken.

Someone actually proposed that it ignore DoT damage and AoE (which just doesn't hit CC'd targets for many CC's now, so I'm just saying Fear should also block CC break by AoE effects) - but break instantly on direct damage. I said 10% earlier in this thread and that got brought up a bunch since then, but I'd like to change my answer to whoever gave the other suggestion. If it breaks on direct damage - it can never be used as a stun. If it ignores DoT damage it won't break instantly for the DoT classes that Fears are given to - it solves both problems.

It does mean that Shadow and Affliction are slightly better off than say, Destruction or Warriors - because our DoTs are stronger - but I doubt it would lead to Shadow or Affliction fearing more often than they would anyways to get more DoT ticks in - especcially if it means we can't attack during the Fear effect or it would break: if that did become the style of play (which I doubt), the fix is as easy as putting a cap on how much DoT damage a target can take in addition to the break-instantly-in-direct-damage mechanic..

Someone actually proposed that it ignore DoT damage and AoE (which just doesn't hit CC'd targets for many CC's now, so I'm just saying Fear should also block CC break by AoE effects) - but break instantly on direct damage. I said 10% earlier in this thread and that got brought up a bunch since then, but I'd like to change my answer to whoever gave the other suggestion. If it breaks on direct damage - it can never be used as a stun. If it ignores DoT damage it won't break instantly for the DoT classes that Fears are given to - it solves both problems.

It does mean that Shadow and Affliction are slightly better off than say, Destruction or Warriors - because our DoTs are stronger - but I doubt it would lead to Shadow or Affliction fearing more often than they would anyways to get more DoT ticks in - especcially if it means we can't attack during the Fear effect or it would break: if that did become the style of play (which I doubt), the fix is as easy as putting a cap on how much DoT damage a target can take in addition to the break-instantly-in-direct-damage mechanic..

I dunno, I feel like that solution would just lead to Destro having no options but to get their face smashed in by melee classes that can't be controlled. What if Fear (the spell, not the effect) functioned differently for each Warlock spec? Afflic could not break at all on DoT damage, Destro could break at a reasonable level subject to diminishing returns, Demo... I don't know, I've never played Demo. Suggestions?

#GamerGate has as much to do with misogyny and hatred as atheism has to do with the Big Bang Theory - belief in the BBT is completely separate to the assertion that there is no conclusive proof that any god exists. #GamerGate is about ethics in video game journalism. Misogyny is an optional extra of a vocal minority.

Perhaps I phrased that wrongly - I get why people are saying it should break on damage, that's fine. What I don't get is why they insist it be such a low %. To me, that just sounds like "fuck Warlocks" rather than a serious suggestion about how to fix what they consider broken.

i don't think 10% is a low %. it would allow locks to apply their dots while preventing nasty gibs you can't do anything about.

what's more, as a paladin fear is a big fat FU to my primary cc ( and when i'm ret, my way to dispel teammates out of cc) out since hand of sac dosn't do enough damage to break it (ib4yvaelletellsmemy5minutedefensiveisaccout) i've got no end of screen caps of me taking nearly my entire hp worth of hand of sacrifice damage and it not breaking, let alone it not breaking to being hit with 100k devouring plague hits.

I dunno, I feel like that solution would just lead to Destro having no options but to get their face smashed in by melee classes that can't be controlled. What if Fear (the spell, not the effect) functioned differently for each Warlock spec? Afflic could not break at all on DoT damage, Destro could break at a reasonable level subject to diminishing returns, Demo... I don't know, I've never played Demo. Suggestions?

well therein lies one of the big problems with the debate on fear, on one hand they have to balance it so that it is an effective CC and keeps warlocks and shadow priests from just being killed, on the other hand there is a point (which a lot of melee feel it has already reached) where it stops doing just that and becomes unbalanced in favor of the classes that have it. it used to be that damage had a chance of breaking it and warlocks managed to do fairly well with that (even then they could be considered one of the big PVP classes of the game due to the multiple types of fear which aren't on the same DR.) and that chance was fairly high, warlocks had pets and abilities to counteract the danger posed by the limited power on fear, technically they still do with their high baseline health and defensive cooldowns. shadow priests had the ability to self heal when they had people off of them as well as bubble, again, they still do. where I think it became an issue of them buffing it is when they were buffing OTHER CCs like stun effects and the higher damage and healing classes can do now (full health healadin in 3 seconds of instant casts, rogues cutting people in half and disappearing the second they get threatened only to do it again). it kind of feels like an arms race (heh, arms, warrior spec, me are so witty) to see whose CC can be the most powerful with the arguments just getting bigger in favor of each class as the others are raised to compensate, really short of just reworking CC completely I don't think it will really be balanced to a degree everyone agrees on.

I see your "wat" and raise you "I have been brought down my full health in 1-2 fears without them breaking simply because my trinket was down", as others have stated that might happen but I really haven't seen it at all. there's really no CC in this game that can be seen as useless or underpowered in every situation.

No, it can happen to all fear effects - part of the problem with fear effects is how random it is, sometimes it breaks on a single dot tick - other times it feels like a kidney shot during a shadowdance. It needs a fixed % of max hp, or a more comprehensible mechanic - not a % chance each time the target receives damage (which is what it is right now).

I suspect one of the problems is just that burst is still too high, so your fear breaks but you've taken a whopping chunk of damage to break it.

Really we just need to hope the next expansion addresses instant CC and instant heals, since GC has been saying they can't do one without the other.

Originally Posted by Taros

Fear is already the weakest cc in the game.

Mmm, not true. It breaks on damage making it less useful than stuns, but on the other hand due to fear pathing that 8s fear can turn into 8s of fear plus 12s+ getting back to your target. Honestly, I'd be okay if all fears went down to 4s duration. Possibly with some added CC or reduced CDs to compensate.

That people complain about how easily Fear breaks and about how it never breaks suggests to me that it's basically fine. If this is because of RNG, that's not true, but I think it's just that people with Fear want it to last longer, and people without it want to come off quicker.

That said, I fucking rage when a fear in Dalaran plops me right behind a box and I stay there. How does that happen?

No, it can happen to all fear effects - part of the problem with fear effects is how random it is, sometimes it breaks on a single dot tick - other times it feels like a kidney shot during a shadowdance. It needs a fixed % of max hp, or a more comprehensible mechanic - not a % chance each time the target receives damage (which is what it is right now).

aaand here's where my inexperience with forum posting shows up, I managed to double post on accident earlier then managed to delete both, anyway I had a response to this that the "breaks on % of health" approach is probably the most balanced but it would have to be very carefully tracked to avoid the percentage being too high or too low for situations of chaining CC and keeping it valid, I also had a response to spectral that the issue he's talking about is most likely a pathing issue (RNG + terrain bugs) which is kind of why you can sometimes be feared through a wall and wind up having to run back from some other zone...really hope posting this doesn't cause more problems T_T

I also had a response to spectral that the issue he's talking about is most likely a pathing issue (RNG + terrain bugs)

That's what I've assumed. I think it's just flatly probabilistic. Once you're behind a box/pillar, something like 30% of your potential paths are through solid shapes; if you can't path through them, you'll sit behind them. That'll only happen for a second or so, but when your teammate is dying, a second feels like an eternity. It's not actually broken, it's just frustrating as fuck.